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The message of Frederick Clarkson's article "Christian Right Seeks Renewal in Deepening Catholic-Protestant Alliance," for Political Research Associates, has garnered additional online comment. (See Religious Right Watch's early post.)

Paul Rosenberg of Crooks and Liars notes that Clarkson argues that although seemingly on the defensive,

leading conservative Catholics (including Church leadership) and evangelical Protestants have just in the last few years become more politically unified than ever before in their history, and this newly-achieved unity — something never really seen before — needs to be viewed as potentially deeply threatening.

Ultra-conservative lawmakers aligned with the Tea Party hold sway in more than 20 states, and they are passing a wave of regressive anti-abortion bills.
At the same time, we’re seeing a constant barrage of legislative assaults on public education through vouchers and other schemes as well as various proposals designed to undermine church-state separation.

Clarkson...points to the Manhattan Declaration, a document released in 2010 by an alliance of prominent Religious Right figures and ultra-conservative Catholic leaders. I attended the press conference when the document was unveiled. I recall being struck by its openly theocratic overtones. It looked like an attempt to drag the world back to the Dark Ages.
.....One of the engineers of the Manhattan Declaration was Robert P. George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton who is known for his extreme opposition to gay rights and his insistence that same-sex unions violate “natural law.”... George’s fans hail him as a brilliant thinker. He’s well connected politically and was recently named the chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), talking to a religious right audience, made a spirited case against marriage equality. "On marriage there is no issue in which we need to be more on our knees because the momentum is with the opponents of traditional marriage. We're facing an assault on marriage." He scolded "unelected judges" who think "we know better" on marriage, and urged pastors to "to speak to your congregations and to mobilize the people, and mobilize them more than anything to pray."

Frederick Clarkson, a senior fellow at Political Research Associates (PRA), has written an important, insightful, and almost certainly prophetic look at the strengthening alliance between Roman Catholic and Protestant elements of the religious right.

As PRA summarizes:

Despite recent losses in the culture war, the Christian Right is forging a path forward by rallying around a few key issues: antichoice, opposition to marriage equality, and the defense of “religious liberty.” These themes—set forth in the influential Manhattan Declaration in 2009—have proved powerful enough to unify conservative Catholics and Protestants against their common enemies.

From Clarkson's article:

Given the Christian Right’s recent defeats in the realm of marriage equality, it might seem that its power is diminishing and that the so-called culture wars are receding. But “We Stand in Solidarity” is one of many indications that its resolve has deepened rather than dissipated in the face of recent political setbacks. This dynamic, multifaceted movement—one of the most powerful in U.S. history—aims to become a renewed, vigorous force in American public life, and it continues to evolve even while maintaining its views on core issues.

Notably, the movement is being shaped and sustained by a political alliance between evangelicals and the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. Though it was unthinkable as recently as a decade ago, this developing evangelical-Catholic alliance is key to understanding the Christian Right’s plan for regrouping in the near term—and ultimately reclaiming the future.

A Christian group has obtained more than 33,000 signatures for a petition demanding that CNN cease putting Family Research Council chief Tony Perkins on its airwaves with his “anti-gay” views.

The group, Faithful America, describes itself as a “community dedicated to reclaiming Christianity from the religious right,” refusing to “sit by quietly while Jesus’ message of good news is hijacked to serve a hateful political agenda.” As such, one of their causes is to put an end to the cable news outlet’s use of Perkins as a “voice for Christian causes.”

“Even as church bells rang out to celebrate a victory for equality,” the petition reads, “CNN once again turned to a hate-group leader to speak on behalf of America’s Christians. Tony Perkins doesn’t speak for us, and CNN needs to stop giving him a platform to spread anti-gay hate.”

Rev. Randall Balmer, Mandel Family Professsor of Arts & Sciences at Dartmouth College and chairman of Dartmouth's religion department, recently spoke at Zion Episcopal Church in Manchester, VT and made an important point about the origins of the religious right-wing political movement, as reported by Mark E. Rondeu (@banner_religion) in the Bennington Banner:

It is widely believe that evangelicals turned against Carter and toward the Republicans because of abortion, legalized in the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973. Balmer calls this "the abortion myth."

Instead he pointed to a lower court ruling which upheld the contention by the Internal Revenue Service that "any organization that engages in racial segregation or racial discrimination is not by definition a charitable organization. Therefore it has no claims on tax-exempt status, and similarly any donations to such an organizations can no longer qualify for tax exemption," Balmer said.

This was used by the IRS in 1975 to rescind the tax exemption of Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist school in Greenvile, S.C., which did not admit African Americans to the student body until 1971 and until 1975, out of fears of racial mixing, did not admit unmarried African Americans.

"That is what got people like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the other leaders of the religious right activated as political players in order to reverse those actions against these schools," he said. "That was the catalyst for the Religious Right. Abortion did not become part of the religious right agenda until 1979."

Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH), has fallen in love with Judy Meissner’s term aberrosexualist, which he says is “is certainly more accurate than‘gay’ and more comprehensive than homosexual.” If that is true, aberrochristian is far more accurate when referring to bigots like LaBarbera than the term Christian.

No one who values democracy can applaud this military takeover, much less the jailing and silencing of nearly all the Muslim Brotherhood's leadership. They were, after all, the duly elected government of Egypt. As Khalid Abou el Fadl angrily points out in al Jazeera, the secularists who protested the harassment of television host Bassem Youssef have had little to say about the wholesale shuttering of Muslim Brotherhood media.

Yet, no one can overlook the fact that, much like the Religious Right in America, the Muslim Brotherhood aspires to a majoritarian dictatorship. From the start, the Brotherhood's goal has been to restore the Caliphate. "I have been saying all along, 'If you want to build Shariah law, come to elections.'" a dismayed Libyan Islamist sheikh is quoted as saying in the New York Times. This neatly sums up why Old Time Religion cannot lead a modern liberal democracy. To OTR, elections are merely a portal to a way-back machine.

Power-sharing, pluralism, minority rights -- these are alien concepts to those who seek to rule in God's name. Yet, these concepts form the heartbeat of liberal democracy. Mere majoritarian rule is no less arbitrary and cruel than dictatorship. In Egypt, it unleashed vicious assaults on the Coptic Christian minority. In Iran, the 1979 overthrow of the Shah led to an Islamic Republic that brutally suppressed its native Baha'i minority. But there's nothing special about Islam in this: free elections in Burma have led to the savage persecution of Muslims by the Buddhist majority there.

the Republican party in Indiana appears to have amended the state criminal code to either make it a crime, or confirm that it remain a crime, for clergy to conduct weddings for gay couples......The amendment to the criminal code, which will go into effect on July 1, 2014, makes it a misdemeanor, punishable by up to 180 days in jail and a fine of $1,000 for clergy “solemnize” a marriage of two men or two women.

IC 31-11-11-7 Solemnization of marriage between persons prohibited from marrying
Sec. 7. A person who knowingly solemnizes a marriage of individuals who are prohibited from marrying by IC 31-11-1 commits a Class B misdemeanor.As added by P.L.1-1997, SEC.3.

Fundamentalist Pastor Steven Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona recently appeared on an Irish radio show. I’m not sure what the expectation was, but the host spoke with him for over an hour — with callers — and Anderson found a way to piss off just about everyone. (***Update***: For the uninitiated, you can read more posts about Anderson here, here, here, and here.)

some public schools in America do all they can to avoid teaching evolution. Thanks to constant pressure from the Religious Right, many public schools are battlegrounds in a culture war that does great damage to our nation’s scientific credibility as creationists work overtime to slip their ideas into the curriculum.